Electricity, Waste, and the “Other”: Racialization in the Electrification of the American West, 1902-1933

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Co-sponsored by Environmental Sociology Section)

Abstract

Climate change is the product of past social actions, yet historical sociologists have largely been absent from its study and theorization. In this paper, I demonstrate the value of an historical sociological approach to climate change, particularly its ability to identify the structures and processes that have given rise to climate change. Through an historical sociological study of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s (BoR) efforts to extend electric infrastructure in the American west at the turn of the twentieth century, I suggest that the electric energy system was advanced via processes of Othering, racialization, and colonization. Specifically, I find that members of Congress and BoR officials relied on discourses of “waste”, which erased pre-existing socio-ecological relations and legitimized white conquest, to justify their social and technological interventions in the west. Electricity, I show, emerged as the solution to three distinct forms of waste: waste lands, waste water, and waste people. I therefore suggest that the early American electric system was not merely built to benefit white settlers, but that the electric system was built through the Othering and exclusion of non-white populations. In other words, the BoR co-constituted electricity and whiteness in the American west. Given that the electric grid “locked in” a fossil-dependent infrastructural system in the twentieth century, my findings indicate the material contributions of racialization and settler colonialism to contemporary climate change. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of this argument for the (historical) sociology of climate change, with particular attention to the prominent role the electric grid plays in current conversations around decarbonization.

Author

• Margot Ruth Lurie, University of Chicago